So Bad It's Purr-fect
(originally posted on IMDb 4 September 2018)

While one would have to be kitten to call this the cat's meow, "Catwoman" is so bad that it may be catalogued as good--so catastrophic in conception and made of the waste one finds in the litter box, that it's as amusing as watching a kitty playing with yarn. At least, it left me feline good. Halle Berry's performance, while surely compared to coughing up a hairball by someone, was worth it merely as the catalyst for her to hold up her Oscar, for "Monster's Ball" (2001), in one hand and her Razzie, for this, in the other as she accepted her award at the Golden Raspberry ceremony.

Her Patience--already baring the name of a pet--begins generically as supposedly less-attractive, or at least not as sexy, although all this amounts to is Berry (this sentence is cataphoric, by the way) generally pussy-footing through life and wearing loose clothes. While not exactly the cat's pajamas, her wardrobe is loose enough to comfortably sleep in. Since it's a superhero movie with a female lead, the filmmakers, apparently, thought it appropriate to turn the first part into a rom-com. "Saturday Night Live" later made a joke of a Black Widow movie as a rom-com, seemingly too scatty to recall that DC and Warner Bros. had already done that with their superheroine here. Thus, Patience has two co-worker friends who interfere in her sex life, one being the rotund comic-relief type and the other the stereotypical gay guy friend. They even provided her with a latex fetish garment, which she repurposes for her first catsuit. And much of the movie is spent on this mouser dating that hot detective from "Law & Order," including some ludicrously-inappropriate sexual flirtation and pawing during a one-on-one basketball game they perform in front of a crowd of school children.

While the rom-com high jinks continue, we're also introduced to some hissingly-bad CGI for everything from artificial environments, to magical cats, to Berry leaping across buildings, along with a wretched, if catchy, pop-music score, whooshing sound effects for kicks and twirls and dizzying edits to workaround the choreographed fight moves. Patience receives her second of nine lives by being resurrected by an Egyptian Mau's bad breath, which causes her to become another breed of cat, so to speak--actually, some sort of human-CGI-cat hybrid, as she rubs catnip on her face, prances about her furniture, hisses at barking dogs, scratches men, hates rain, loves sushi and lies in bed eating eight cans of tuna by hand. She learns that a cat in gloves catches no mice and, thus, starts running around and performing catwalks on ledges in a shredded dominatrix cat costume complete with a whip.

The best worst thing of all here, however, has to be the dialogue, which is full of some remarkably bad comebacks, puns and, if lucky, catchwords and catchphrases. While Patience is a graphic artist, she lays into her boss with the musical reference, "Then let me try the remix." Even better, she responds to another villain's line of "game over," with the least clever of rejoinders, "Guess what. It's overtime." And, back to the rom-com part, her retort to a warning of a deadly loose electric cable is, "I know I felt a spark between us." Then, of course, there are the cat puns: "What a purr-fect idea" or "Cat got your tongue," when, in fact, she is holding his tongue. She even orders a White Russian at a nightclub, but with "no ice, hold the vodka, hold the Kahlua."

Sharon Stone is also an appropriately catty glamour puss scorned by her tomcat hubby (in other words, she doesn't like "Sharon" her man). There's some ridiculous plot involving a beauty product with hideous side effects, and Berry tries to let this cat out of the bag, but it also gives Stone superpower skin... like a stone, so that she and Berry may catfight, or, if you prefer, fight like cats and dogs. Otherwise, there's a silly science scene where a technician can supposedly tell personalities and genders from handwriting samples. Another scene has Berry slipping like a cat through the bars of a jail cell. There are also clichéd shots of her posed in front of a gigantic moon, and the copycatted orange-and-teal color grading helps make everything look super unrealistic. It's enough to make a cat laugh.